AI-assisted content creation tools have accomplished the democratization of art more than any other industrial innovation in human history. The most memorable cultural images of the last year have been defined by trending explosions of visual content defined by the stumbling maturation of this technology. This dynamic has produced an emergent phenomenon: the AI meme frenzy. The JD Vance meme trend a few weeks ago illuminated this and this week’s Ghibli meme craze affirms this is a recurring episode we will see rerun repeatedly in the coming months and years.
The catalyst for the Ghibli frenzy was OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4o model being granted an updated image generation capability, promising improved accuracy and easier prompting. Shortly after, tweets began going viral as people discovered requesting a Studio Ghibli style filter of photos of themselves charmingly reproduced the studio’s chief founder and iconic animator Hayao Miyazaki’s signature style of hand drawn anime.
Studio Ghibli, best popularized in the West for cross-over hits such as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, specializes in comforting children’s movies known for cozy environments, delicious food platters, kindred moments between adorable characters, and being the default choice for every young man in America to put up as background fodder for bringing art-core girlfriends to their dorm rooms when they don’t feel like using a Wes Anderson film.
Very soon, hundreds of men picked up on the utility of using the photos of their wives, girlfriends, and crushes to be fed in GPT-4o to be “Ghiblified” into saccharine depictions and sent off as innocuous text messages to impress their loved ones. It wasn’t long before thousands of people participated in Ghiblifying every single iconic photo, meme, and historically relevant moment they could pull from recent memory.
The timeline was swarmed with a picturebook collage of highlights from internet culture and contemporary events, ranging from the most iconic photo ops of the past few years to famous recognizable memes which have withstood decades of repetition without becoming stale.
Donald Trump’s triumphant defiance against his assassination attempt and depictions of the twin towers exploding on 9/11 would share the same vivid blue skies of Porco Rosso, while fictional characters such as Patrick Bateman and Don Draper wear the same expressions as placid background characters in Kiki’s Delivery Service.
No image was safe from this tsunami of conversions. Everything from Richard Nixon to Wojak was painted in this distinct art style, one so coherent and congruent that the entire timeline became a coordinated delivery of a fragmented storybook. A grand montage of the human experience and the memetic evolution of the internet itself was told that day and persisted throughout the week, a summary of existence itself crystallized in the chaotic exaggeration of recognizable memes as a fable prospectus on the Network.
The Studio Ghibli filter centering around the new GPT-4o release was curious, as there seemed to be no major difference between the quality of these new Ghibli’s compared to those that have hit the timeline over the last few years. For example, while the Milady scene has always had early adopters of AI assisted artmaking, one of Milady’s earliest derivative collections specialized in this exact filter all the way back in 2022–“Ghiblady Maker”.
GPT-4o's image generation capabilities represent less of a technical breakthrough and more so an intuitive user interface overhaul. While enthusiasts have long achieved similar results through complex software combinations like ComfyUI with LoRA training, the average user found these methods prohibitively complicated. Much like how ChatGPT's 2022 success stemmed from making existing GPT-3.5 technology more accessible, GPT-4o's achievement lies in democratizing advanced image manipulation. By eschewing the ComfyUI tinkering in favor of a simpler prompting experience, users now simply dictate what they want to see like a king demanding entertainment from his jester.
What is more interesting than the filter itself is the frenzy which formed around it. Memes and internet culture were once gatekept by a core group of creative users who chose to take the extra time to photoshop images or illustrate concepts as symbolic archetypes. AI technology distributes this capability to the masses, engendering the public hivemind to produce an onslaught of aesthetically aligned posting.
The floodgates of creativity have been opened to the crowd. There is no longer delineation between audience and performer. The AI-assisted memetic frenzy is a distinct phenomenon, one which presented itself yesterday as JD Vance’s many faces, today as the world seen through the eyes of Miyazaki, and tomorrow as a hundred different trends exploding across the timeline in exponentially increasing rapidity.
Curiously, the emergence of the AI Meme Frenzy seems to return towards the natural inclination of centralized content consumption. The 20th century was shaped by a culture defined by coordinated exposure to a singular institutional media stream. The internet and digital technology shattered this centralization, allowing individuals to further themselves along algorithm curated bubbles of exposure.
For the first time in human history, every single person on earth has been given the ability to depict anything their imagination can conjure. While this ability is still constrained by technical limitations, AI is rapidly improving at an exponential rate and surpassing a majority of the population’s capacity for imagination. The Ghibli filter craze highlights this limitation, presenting a glimpse of what seems to be an inherent creative constraint by means of adherence to an arbitrary formula.
AI tools for creative output have helped the layman dissect the process of creativity as a simple equation of imitation and interpretation. For years now, a disgruntled mass of self-fashioned “artists” have protested the use of AI in any capacity in the same flavor of futile spite espoused by the Luddites upon the advent of the steam engine.
Their argument is that AI-assisted tooling is a soulless and shoddy imitation of the creative process, one which delivers an inferior product. A counter-meme has been resurfaced to strike back at the Ghibli filters, a clip of Miyazaki himself balking at being presented AI art and calling it “an insult to life itself.” These screenshots were promptly put through the same Ghibli filter; a better retort than even bothering to point out they took his statements out of context (he was being shown genuinely grotesque, nigh-fetishtic body horror slop).
Besides the delusional denial of AI inevitably catching up to a mastery of detail exceeding human capacity, the discomfort of the creatives is an existential crisis. The same argument was made by illustrators 30 years ago who protested the use of digital tools as an inferior alternative to the handcrafted nature of analog mediums. The great advances of AI have surfaced a hidden indignant mass of creative Luddites, sustaining themselves on paltry revenue streams upheld by fierce gatekeeping. The scarcity mindset of creatives is a perennial failing: AI-gen artists themselves now closely guard their personal prompt formulas with the same desperation just as graphic designers would conceal their own special effect workflows and filter extensions.
This existentialism goes beyond the simple fear of being replaced and losing a revenue stream, it is an ego death which was once obscured by an inscrutable barrier of metaphysical mystery.
To the dilettante, creativity seems to be a form of divination, a magical conjuration of new ideas through some personal mastery of a ritualistic process that promises uniqueness by means of tying your own identity to a signature style. Having a computer program replicate that style with mathematical coldness is a haunting prospect to someone whose identity is founded on their ability to create. To the creative, the common oaf being able to reproduce their signature aesthetic instantly without effort carries the same traumatic humiliation of a public mass rape, a confiscation and industrial scale reproduction of their very soul.
Yet, this feeling is only rooted in an inflated ignorance of the creative process, one common to those who occupy the peak of amateur arrogance on the Dunning-Kruger scale. Actual accomplished professionals tend to surpass the slope of enlightenment, passing through a great barrier of dissolution that allows them to come to terms with the infinite potential of turning anything into a reproducible product–reacting instead with excitement at the increased capacity for creative output AI provides them, as digital technology has already done for every creative industry over the last decades.
The reality is the majority of manually created work online is as equally disposable as AI produced content. The layman creative upholds the element of handmade work as a sacred virtue, a cult of meticulousness, only because it is what defines their own moat instead of any genuine artistry.
Their failure lies in their misunderstanding the nature of what makes art striking, or not. It is conceptual depth, quite simply assessed on the layers of interpretation and meaning embedded within. Most legitimate art employs four or more elements to be considered seriously, that can leave you ruminating on it for days, weeks, and months after seeing it
Most people do not have a need to go beyond a factor of two when it comes to enjoying anything, whether it’s a joke told in the breakroom or a memetic phenomenon to be used as discussion fodder by pundits and commentary streamers.
Ghibli memes are conceptually shallow at the minimum level. They’re a very simple juxtaposition: A thing + Ghibli filter. The intent and expression does elevate them above the most basic “slop,” and most pedestrian memes exist in this binary state of conceptual depth, including the most hackneyed viral joke formula of “what if this thing, but it’s like that thing.” Likewise, every anti-AI “artist” invariably has a personal brand designed, at best, around a very simple singular twist on any given style. They cannot meaningfully position themselves as distinct or better as an artist compared to the average Ghibli filter enjoyer.
However, AI art is not limited to this simple formula, it is simply a tool to be used up to the limitations of its handler.
AI-assisted generational tools can be used to effectively create multifactored citational art, as demonstrated in the emergent, self-referential #CHEESEWORLD memes, built on playfully daisy chaining iterative outputs to create complex memes around a collaborative, ironic lore. Each #CHEESEWORLD meme acts as a sort of cultural artifact, chaining the posterity of their references to their own existence by means of recursion, representing a much more complex engagement with AI directly making use of the democratization of visual production.
The generic nature of content produced by AI generators is merely a symptom of statistical congruity with the needs of the population at large. A majority of people have no desire to exceed beyond the impulse of amusement.
The Ghibli memes are not trying to be art, they’re not pretending to be Miyazaki, and their formulaic nature is not a spewing of mediocrity–they are personalized joy at the hands of an individual.
People pass their own selfies through the filter to see what the carnival funhouse mirror will show them. They feed family photos and group selfies to a silicon scribe so they can send the results to friends in group chats like a digital version of painted facehole boards to stick their head through for amusing postcards.
You will continue to witness these memetic frenzies with greater rapidity and increasing complexity. Memes will no longer be disparate liminal nodes to be cataloged in wikis along a hazy timeline of online cultural history. They will become distinct eras, condensing lifespans of trends down to a few days of shared focused amusement, identifiable by whichever style or connotation dominates the fractional attention span of the cultural zeitgeist for the week.
This week’s Ghibli moment served as a particularly fitting example. The Miyazaki style seems to canonize so many years spent online into an epilogistic montage, a melancholy collection of fragmental history akin to children picking up their toys after a long day of play.
Or maybe it’s more like tossing a digital camera into the primate enclosure of a zoo, watching the monkeys tinker with its buttons and startle themselves at impromptu flash photography before peering curiously into the preview screen to parse their pixelated reflections.
Michael Dragovic is Chief of Staff at Remilia Corporation and goes by Scorched Earth Policy on Twitter (@scearpo). When he's not working, you can find him hovering above the Pacific Ocean as a 750-mile wide metal cube rotating and oscillating at Mach 5.
